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9:25 a.m. - 2004-04-27
long distance
I was thinking last night how strange it is to be in a long distance relationship in this technological age. Imagine (and this is directed most personally to Brooke, Rob, their significant others, Megan Householder (do you read this Megan) and of course Collin. Anyway, imagine what it would have been like 50 or 60 years ago, during whatever war was going on then, when soldiers left their girlfriends and brides behind and all they had was FREAKING LETTERS. Are you kidding me? I get antsy if I don't get five emails, two text messages and often a phone call on a DAILY basis. Can you imagine what it would be like to get like one or two letters a week? I think I would have gone insane. When you offend each other or imsinterpret something, it is necessary to send at least three or four emails to clarify, or have a 20 minute phone conversation about it. Can you imagine what misunderstandings were like back in the day? I mean, seriously, you'd get a letter from your soldier-boy and it would contain some comment that upset you. You'd furiously get out your pen and paper, and write an indignant letter, with lots of question marks and exclamation points. You'd send it off, tossing it down the mail box chute, spin on your heel, cross your arms, toss your hair back, over your cardigan or whatever and stalk away thinking "that'll show HIM!" 2 weeks later, a letter comes that explains everything...IF he wasn't so prideful that he had to fire off an equally nasty piece of correspondance, delaying the clarification process another month or more.

Actually now that i think about it, it makes me think that people back then were probably a little less nuerotic than we are, and they probably just wrote stuff like "I love you and I miss you" that didn't really need to be processed or clarified, instead of stuff I write that Collin has to put up with along the lines of something like "Because you are an INTJ, you tend to process more internally, and, it appears, occasionally need to have some alone-time, which is strange to me because since we're in a long distance relationship, it seems to me that you have all of the alone time in the world. As an ESTJ, this is difficult for me to relate to because as you know, I tend to draw my energy from being around other people and so your INTJ-ness makes me feel like...blah blah blah."

You get the picture. Imagine if people who only had letters (SLOW lettters) communicated like that. Did they? Maybe they did, and they just had patience to deal with it....the days and days of waiting for a response. Don't you think that's interesting?! How the dynamics of relationships have changed and been influenced by technology? If I were in grad school I would write a paper on that.

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